ladyattis (u/ladyattis)

ladyattis commented on Dungeons and Dragons embarks on an epic quest to finally make money bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

ehutch79 · 3 years ago

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams are looking to grow the future of Dungeons & Dragons through “the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games.”

https://kotaku.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-fifth-edition-on...

ladyattis · 3 years ago

I don't see that working out as well as they imagine. The big thing is that folks use D&D as a form of structured play whether it's online or offline. It's that interaction and the freedom of both the players and the GMs to figure out how to structure it. Unless Hasbro accepts that they must limit their 'recurring payment' model to make that less painful for players then I suspect that D&D the brand will decline in relevance with competing TTRPGs replacing them.

ladyattis commented on C++ Initialization Story old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comm... · Posted by u/_hao

zabzonk · 3 years ago

as someone that has been using c++ since the late 1980s, can i observe that about 75% of c++'s features are aimed at library writers? most people writing application code simply do not need to know the syntax or the semantics of this stuff - these are all features that make c++ libraries simpler, easier and more efficient to use, mostly transparent to the library user.

ladyattis · 3 years ago

I remember somewhere in one of my undergrad courses textbook that had a quote to something of the effect that C++ was a federation of languages. And honestly, it still feels like that all these years later. It's both a blessing and a curse depending on what you need to do. Most folks probably never venture fair outside their specific subset of C++ to use anything else and probably an unlucky few have to have an esoteric level of understanding the language to do their work. I don't envy the latter.

ladyattis commented on Playing video games can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve mood cscaz.cansurround.com/art... · Posted by u/neomindryan

ladyattis · 3 years ago

I'm surprised the article didn't cover "life" or simulation games since these are often seem to be relaxing games compared to more frantic games like MMOs. For me, Stardew Valley is my comfort game when I just wanna to turn off thinking for a little bit and go fishing or chat with Linus by the lake. Or go on a gift giving run. It just seems like you can kind of turn off your head and go with the flow in the game rather than trying to min-max. I'm sure there's tons of videos for Stardew Valley that focus on min-maxing but I'm glad I just ignore them otherwise, I'd be restarting my game to do that, no thanks.

ladyattis commented on Playing video games can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve mood cscaz.cansurround.com/art... · Posted by u/neomindryan

rye-neat · 3 years ago

I'm nearing 40 and in the past few years I've tried to focus more on "real world" activities (I've never lacked them, I just felt like gaming had less value). I've done well with this by spending time with my interests/pastimes; however, my work lately has been less stimulating. As a result, something has been missing.

Long story short, I realized I wasn't getting into a "flow-state" often enough and guess where you can get an easy fix of that? First-person shooters.. (for me anyway). I don't have 3+ hour-long sessions or anything, maybe just a round or two and it's like that first cup of coffee in the morning.

ladyattis · 3 years ago

It's funny you speak of flow state here since for me reading up on MMORPG meta or any meta changes to any game is where I mostly focus on such that even before I launch a game I've been reading up on its mechanics and trying to understand it in an abstract way (the opposite of this for me is when I just play Stardew Valley since I just wanna fish or chat with the NPCs rather than figure out how to min-max my farm). The act of figuring out how a game works mechanically is just as fun as trying to play the game itself for me.

ladyattis commented on · Posted by u/novia

nradov · 3 years ago

How many people die every year from medical deprivation? While that is a legitimate problem that we need to fix, I'm skeptical whether that could exceed the 100M who have been killed by Communism.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/

ladyattis · 3 years ago

Victims of Communism and the authors of the Black Book of Communism's own figures are debated by experts of the history of Russia and the USSR, especially during Stalin's reign. Many of the deaths that the Black Book of Communism sites were mostly due to the invasion by Nazi Germany (somewhere around 10 or 20 million iirc). The rest are also mostly not direct deaths by the Bolsheviks or the USSR state apparatus (this is including the famines). And the biggest problem with the book is that it often makes up the figures whole cloth.

This isn't saying the USSR or the Bolsheviks weren't horrible, but one must put their crimes against humanity in the proper context and not turn them into super inhuman villains as much as we did with the Nazis (they too were horrible, but sadly they were very much a product of the mainstream values of their time).

Plus, the claim that allowing for social democratic policies like UBI, IP law reform, and the like to come to fruition isn't going to create another Red Terror. If anything, it's the most conservative thing you can do (see German Empire and the institution of Social Insurance by Otto von Bismarck) since it retains capitalism but tames its worse aspects for a time. This is why I roll my eyes at folks like Thiel since they rarely have anything that would be a viable alternative than status quo and lying about how bad things are for many people today. And I say this as someone who's far left of many folks being a Mutualist and an anarchist.

ladyattis commented on · Posted by u/novia

tdehnel · 3 years ago

I'm going to try and explain how I understand Peter Thiel's worldview here, which I've learned from listening to him talk and reading what he writes. You can downvote this all you want, but I believe it's an accurate interpretation. I'll try to keep my own opinions out of it.

To understand Thiel's position, you have to broaden your idea of harm past immediate harm to a single group of people.

While I'm sure Thiel has personal economic concerns, his stated primary moral concern is preventing wealth redistribution, socialism, and the mass-scale violence that those programs have caused in the past. You can choose to believe him as to whether this is his true motivation or not, but you asked for an explanation of this worldview and that's what he's stuck with over 10+ years now.

While you might be more worried about Nazis, Thiel is more worried about things like 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions, the ensuing Red Terror, and mass starvation/poverty. About 20M people died in Russia during this time, mostly from starvation but up to 200,000 dead by being executed by the state for having the wrong political beliefs. And many more during the various violent uprisings and civil wars.

Some of you reading this are going to huff and just disregard it, but for Thiel, preventing potential massive tragedy in the future is likely worth a tradeoff of some people being "harmed" now.

Edit: the number of replies to your comment which basically amount to "he just doesn't care about others/he's rich so he's evil" indicate that even the Hacker News audience is not immune to believing in lazy explanations and supernatural forces. Google "The Myth of Pure Evil" for more on this.

ladyattis · 3 years ago

The problem with Thiel's worldview is that it's not all that accurate. Yes, the Soviet Union was a horrible authoritarian state but the alternative to it isn't any better especially if you're not in the United States or of its preferred/default social classes. The damage done by the USSR and the Russian civil war pale in comparison to the yearly death toll of millions from medical deprivation and starvation even after the Green Revolution (we still have a distribution problem wrt food and medicine). His solutions are basically go back to some form of feudalism but without there being a singular sovereign to keep the nobles of our age in check (i.e. him and other billionaires). The reality is that capitalism has been limping along post Cold War and it's not getting any better, so without there being an outside threat to unify ourselves around, its flaws are seen more keenly and felt more closely than in the past. If Thiel wants to stop the second Bolshevik revolt then he should focus on making wealth distribution through market means viable and support ending monopolies and enclosures of various commons (weaken IP law, reform land rights, and so forth).

ladyattis commented on My thoughts on “bad code” twitter.com/tsoding/statu... · Posted by u/djoldman

ladyattis · 3 years ago

I agree with the comments in the video since often I find myself dealing with opaque code. Having code that's opaque makes it hard to make sense of what it does, when it does what it does, and what happens when it fails. Having code that's obviously less than optimal but still understandable is far better as the OP mentions in the video. At least with bad code that's understandable you can improve it sometimes if the underlying requirements and dependencies aren't too deep (otherwise, you're gonna break something and it's better to just leave it be bad or ugly code).

ladyattis commented on More People Are Freaked Out by AI Than Excited About It pcmag.com/news/not-a-fan-... · Posted by u/petodo

ChatGTP · 3 years ago

Just a funny / interesting example of something that happened with ChatGPT last night. I asked it to translate my resume to another language from English, and it interpreted my resume as, hey "let's write code now" and opened up a prompt and started doing things in the prompt in another language...it was wild.

ladyattis · 3 years ago

Yeah, it's easy to make ChatGPT do wrong things which is why I'm not so concerned about it other than companies using it as an excuse to further strip down essential technicians for such platforms. I think ChatGPT can be a wonderful tool if corporations would stop pretending that capital can always replace labor which won't happen anytime soon since many C-suite folks are naive about most things in my experience.

ladyattis commented on Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything (2018) programmingisterrible.com... · Posted by u/bshanks

ladyattis · 3 years ago

When you usually have flags in your function then you really have two functions in one which can be a problem. In practice, I usually break these kinds of functions down if it's looking like it's handling radically different cases, it does add some duplication but most times it's just the boilerplate of the language/platform than the actual work itself.

ladyattis commented on More People Are Freaked Out by AI Than Excited About It pcmag.com/news/not-a-fan-... · Posted by u/petodo

ladyattis · 3 years ago

I don't know why folks are so freaked out about it. Yes, some of these programs can act somewhat like a person in text but often their output is just garbage. Heck, even AI focused on image generation gets hands wrong much as human artists do (sometimes even worse). It's strange to see folks being freaked out or otherwise surprised by computers. Maybe I'm just too old to care or understand the response.